As long as Ukraine has a region in dispute it is unlikely to join Nato. Russia appears determined to make sure of that, as exemplified by a recent clash with Ukraine’s military off the coast of the disputed Crimea region.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea from neighbouring Ukraine and a simmering pro-Russian rebellion in Ukraine’s east have made the US-led military alliance susceptible to a direct conflict with
Russia if it were to accept Ukraine into the bloc.
“I do not see a possibility for joining the alliance within the next decade,” Taras Zahorodniy, director of a political and conflict assessment think-tank based in Kiev, the National Anti-Crisis Group, said.
“That would be unrealistic while Crimea and the Donbass are occupied,” Zahorodniy said, referring to Ukraine’s Donetsk Basin, where pro-Russian separatist groups have been battling the Ukrainian military for more than four years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted to Russian troops facilitating the annexation of Crimea, but his government has staunchly denied Ukraine’s allegations of direct involvement in the Donbass conflict.
“The Russian government is not going to change its fundamental national interest put forward by Putin: no unfriendly political and military alliances on the territory of the former Soviet republics,” said Nabi Abdullaev, director for Russia at the global consultancy Control Risks Group.
Three former Soviet republics on the Baltic Sea — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — managed to join Nato during Putin’s first term. Ukraine and another former Soviet republic, Georgia, have aspirations to join the Western military alliance.
With broad parallels to the current conflict in Ukraine’s two eastern-most regions on the Russian border, Georgia lost control of two breakaway regions in a brief war with Russia in 2008.
“Russia through its intervention in Ukraine has achieved its goal of preventing formal integration of Ukraine into those unfriendly alliances — the EU and Nato,” Abdullaev said.
In mid-December, the United Nations reiterated condemnation of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, expressing concern at increased Russian military presence in the surrounding waters.
Russia must “withdraw its military forces from Crimea and end its temporary occupation of Ukraine’s territory without delay,” the UN said in a statement upon adopting a Ukraine-backed resolution to issue the condemnation.
Russian forces in late November had opened fire and captured several Ukrainian naval vessels and their crews in the Kerch Strait, a waterway off the coast of Crimea that connects the Black Sea with the smaller Sea of Azov.
The incident demonstrated Russia’s willingness to use military force to assert its claim over Crimea nearly five years after it annexed the peninsula via a disputed referendum.
As Russia has achieved its goal of preventing Ukraine from joining Nato, Russia is “unlikely to seek to expand the conflict zone further into Ukraine to seek control over additional territory,” Abdullaev said.
Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, echoed that assumption. “I don’t see any great likelihood of a serious escalation,” he said.
“We may have incidents such as the Kerch clash, and there will continue to be skirmishes along the line of contact [in the Donbass], but the Russians and Ukrainians are both unlikely to want to escalate on any serious level,” Galeotti said.
The conflict in the Donbass could last as long as Russia maintains its own national stability, said Ivan Kurilla, an international relations and history professor at the European University in St Petersburg.
The Donbass conflict “seems to be planned on the model of Transnistria or South Ossetia in the previous decades, so it could last long,” Kurilla said, referring to breakaway Moldovan and Georgian regions where the conflicts are now frozen. — DPA
Peter Spinella
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